Review of Clark Chilson and Ian Reader, On Being Nonreligious in Contemporary Japan: Decline, Antipathy and Aversion By Carole Cusack

https://www.academia.edu/145230239/Review_of_Clark_Chilson_and_Ian_Reader_On_Being_Nonreligious_in_Contemporary_Japan_Decline_Antipathy_and_Aversion?email_work_card=title Recent research suggests that a certain perception of Japan as a deeply religious and/ or spiritual place and the Japanese as people who, while less engaged with formal religion in the twenty-first century, are still strongly invested in traditional festivals (matsuri) and the landscape of temples, shrines, and kami, is false. Hannah Gould’s When Death Falls Apart: Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2023), for example, examines Buddhist material culture surrounding death; these include, but are not exhausted by, the home altar (butsudan), recitation of sutras, prayers, and offerings to the dead. Gould’s study of the life-course of butsudan (from manufacture, through purchase, then use) reveals a dissolution of Buddhist belonging and reluctance to commit to the labour of death rites. Ian Reader and Clark Chilson’s On Being Nonreligious in Contemporary Japan: Decline, Antipathy and Aversion to Institutions takes a much broader approach to the decline of religiosity in Japan, and reveals a country and its citizens that are nonreligious by choice, and characterised by profound distaste for institutional affiliation, which is viewed as parasitic, focused on money, and involving possible deviant behaviour, and anti-social attitudes. ...